Spreading the word: Embedding as a means of advocacy – a soft approach to social media

Our concept is a small Flash application that any web user (WHO’s partners and the media/bloggers in particular) can embed to their site. The tool can show either a selected piece of WHO information – the most typical pieces being graphs and maps – or it can update automatically to show the latest information from a selected WHO source, for example latest news from a certain health crisis.

The tool clearly indicates that the data is from WHO as a trusted source and encourages further sharing. Links leading back to the WHO crisis website help to promote the work of WHO further.

In our project, we aimed at making up-to-date crisis information easier to access by giving visualized data a central role. Evaluating possibilities for the use of social web practices for WHO’s advocacy efforts in close cooperation with WHO-HAC, we found what we call “a soft approach”: a concept that allows WHO to profit from some of the current trends online, while taking into account that publishing data under the organization’s brand is a very sensitive process (that for example eliminated all our ideas on utilization of user generated content at an early stage).

Below, you can try out our prototype of the embeddable widget. For detailed information about our project and its outcome, you may download these final documents:

Concept poster (one page summary of the concept and how it is anchored into WHO’s advocacy work on the web)

Video (still in post-production, will be added soon)

(This prototype is not an official WHO-product. All the information contained within is from WHO publications. Also, this prototype won’t scale its size to fit the blog width, the real application would scale.)